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Wait a sec, David Auerbach is really going with "my emails were hacked" defense?

In a response to someone on Twitter he says "email spoofing was common back then"? WTF is he talking about? Does he really think his 10K followers-having ass is a red-hot target for hackers who know he's gonna get caught a year later?

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Milo is an interesting case, because any gay people I've encountered who is very white & conservative ended up that way due to internalizing self-hatred and acting straight and "normal" as a way of life, with being out and proud LGBTQA... as bad. Milo is young and has apparently been out and proud as a flamboyant gay man for quite a white. It's why I thought he was on some Andy Kauffman shit for so long when I was first exposed to him on podcasts. He was such an absurd contradictory person that it only made sense to me that it was a persona intended to make fun of self-hating gay conservatives. Of course over time there has been less and less evidence to suggest it's a persona.

You never heard of the Jewish collaborators in WW2? Or to use a more contemporary example: poor/black/latinx people voting Republican? Like aeolist posted above, Milo is just in it for the money and fame and the conservative/reactionary machine are willing to pay him as long it produces those sweet, sweet liberal tears

Yeah, basically they hired a bunch of top notch investigative journalists in 2014. They have some people that go back and forth between creating clickbait listicles and political op-eds, but their investigative team is kept pretty separate.

They were criticized a lot about releasing the whole trump dosier, saying that these good journalists they hired need a serious editor to keep them in check so they don't release non-serious stuff like that, but it seems to have turned out to be the right decision and very serious news.

Pretending to be gay is one hypothetical level of crazy, but going all in on his "underage boys in relationships with creepy old men is totally normal" shit would indicate he's just a particularly noxious type of predatory asshole.

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In an April 6 email, Allum Bokhari mentioned having had access to an account of Yiannopouloss with a password that began with the word Kristall. Kristallnacht, an infamous 1938 riot against German Jews carried out by the SA  the paramilitary organization that helped Hitler rise to power  is sometimes considered the beginning of the Holocaust. In a June 2016 email to an assistant, Yiannopoulos shared the password to his email, which began LongKnives1290. The Night of the Long Knives was the Nazi purge of the leadership of the SA. The purge famously included Ernst Röhm, the SAs gay leader. 1290 is the year King Edward I expelled the Jews from England.

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You never heard of the Jewish collaborators in WW2? Or to use a more contemporary example: poor/black/latinx people voting Republican? Like aeolist posted above, Milo is just in it for the money and fame and the conservative/reactionary machine are willing to pay him as long it produces those sweet, sweet liberal tears

Pretending to be gay is one hypothetical level of crazy, but going all in on his "underage boys in relationships with creepy old men is totally normal" shit would indicate he's just a particularly noxious type of predatory asshole.

Lol, guys, I'm aware there's plenty of people like that (those who side with their oppressors for whatever reason), but with everything that's come out with Milo, can we even be sure that part is true, or is it just part of the act. I don't really trust anything about him at this point

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The language being used against women in Tech mirrored the language we were seeing used against Clinton. They just moved from one target to another. "Shill", "Corrupt", etc. Was really obvious if you were paying attention to both.

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And what did the gaming industry and most of gaming media do? Sit on their asses and ignored the terror while a proto-fascist movement was running people out of culture.

It was fucking infuriating to watch the passivity and silence while people were screaming about how horrible things were. And it still is when gamers think everything is fine again.

Even though the wider societal context of this fascism is handled by publications and people with more integrity and sense of morals than those in games culture, I'm still afraid that the media and institutions do the whole 'both sides' shit and fail to notice the dog whistles and rhetorics that these fascists use.

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Winced when article states Bannon claims alt-right to him was "computer gamers" and blue collars fed up with the GOP. I'm not sure which is more gross - that Breitbart is basically the propaganda wing of Gamergate or that there are enough racist, neo-Nazi pieces of shit in the gaming community/industry that they constitute a large part of the alt-right. It's like finding out half of movie fans or music lovers are really disgusting racist pieces of shit Nazis.

This makes sense. He probably dresses extra flamboyantly to accentuate some flamboyance he has for the purpose, in his mind, of being armor against left-wing critics. He's just a confused motherfucker and I don't know what his deal is that got him to that point. He's the dude who said in one podcast episode that generally scoring higher than straight people on IQ tests factually makes gay men genetically and intellectually superior, but if he could be straight he would definitely opt in for it, because gay men are not as good as straight men or something. Lots of weird, uninformed, contradictory all or nothing thinking.

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And what did the gaming industry and most of gaming media do? Sit on their asses and ignored the terror while a proto-fascist movement was running people out of culture.

It was fucking infuriating to watch the passivity and silence while people were screaming about how horrible things were. And it still is when gamers think everything is fine again.

Even though the wider societal context of this fascism is handled by publications and people with more integrity and sense of morals than those in games culture, I'm still afraid that the media and institutions do the whole 'both sides' shit and fail to notice the dog whistles and rhetorics that these fascists use.

Member

I would call it a flashpoint. None of this stuff is new; the Internet and SA/4chan/reddit culture, plus the total laxity of social media platforms and gatekeepers, has just memeified and weaponized it--and made it easy for assholes to find each other.

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I think that on the whole my analysis of Gamergate holds up pretty well. Certainly better than most, though that's saying very little (endless "Gamergate is dead/over" pieces weren't ever candidates for the next Cassandra). But I did significantly overestimate the extent to which the right would coopt Gamergate, and I want to take a look at why I got that wrong. Though Dems had attempted to use Gamergate as part of a midterm "war on women" narrative, this was not particularly effective, and so after the election I expected the Republicans and conservative press to jump in and talk about a war on white male nerds or somesuch. Certainly, the left-wing press is talking about Gamergate far less now than it did before the election, while the mainstream press is ignoring it because it is simply not worth the trouble. But while assorted small fringe right groups have tried to coopt Gamergate without much success, the mainstream right didn't take up the mantle of Gamergate in any significant way.

So the question is why right-wing cooptation has not happened anywhere near the extent that I thought it would. The demonization that greeted any resistance to the manufactured Gamergate narrative (Hi!) made me think that we might see a breed of "Rand Paul Democrats" in the same way that you got Reagan Democrats as a result of the Great Society and the Civil Rights Act--except this time liberals achieved far less in the bargain. As I wrote in my column this week, this may well still happen, but it won't be because of Gamergate. While Gamergate displays widespread alienation from the loudest and most irritating parts of online left culture, Gamergate has not become the "conservative/reactionary"-identified movement that its detractors insist it was/is, and which I feared it would become. I attribute this to three factors:

1. Gamergate consists primarily of secular, vaguely liberalish types, alongside a mix of moderates, libertarians, and heterodox conservatives. None of them are particularly keen on right-wing dogma. It's a sign of just how sheerly toxic right-wing press is that none of these people are keen on touching Fox, Rush, Hannity, etc. Rather, you get Breitbart UK (the "UK" is important), Reason, Spiked, and a few bloggers at the Daily Caller. But that's as far as Gamergate will generally go. They do not want Fox to become their standard bearer. They trust the rest of the press less than they used to, but Fox is still a dirty word to them.

2. Contrariwise, orthodox right-wingers see Gamergate's mixed political leanings as unreliable and unpredictable, and so weren't hugely eager to bring them into the fold, lest they foment more right-wing civil war with their crazy views. You don't see Cathy Young too often on Fox News either (or Milo Yiannopoulos for that matter). The right is uneasy about Chuck Johnson for this reason; they like it when he goes after people they hate, but then he goes after Allen West. Independent, loosely affiliated actors make dangerous icons.

3. Most significantly, the right was able to adopt Gamergate's playbook without coopting Gamergate. The reactions you see to incidents like Bahar Mustafa and Sad/Rabid Puppies fall far more into the traditional left/right divide than GG vs. anti-GG. (And no, Sad/Rabid Puppies and Gamergate are not the same. Pay attention.) This suggests that while the right was hesitant to get engaged with Gamergate because of its associations with harassment, 4chan, hardcore libertarianism, trans* issues, and all sorts of godless heathen degenerate behavior (as you can see from that list, some of it approved by the left, some of it not), they were paying close attention to the strategies and tactics, and made sure to keep them in store for the *next* time that Oberlin nuttiness or identity politics or "social justice" or whatever coughs up an embarrassing story that the right could hang around the neck of "Democrats" or "feminism" or "liberalism." There was no need to invoke the name of Gamergate. Gamergate had too much moral baggage and ideological confusion for them--something I should have realized--but the content and tactics of Gamergate's critique of "social justice warriors" resonated with them loud and clear.

In some ways, this is a better outcome than what I expected. It gave the US left (including the Dems) time to mount their own counterargument to the social justice movement and thereby not appear beholden to it--the quick adoption of "social justice warrior" as a negative stereotype speaks to this. I'm sure Hillary will have her "Sister Souljah" movement sometime next year just as her husband did in 1992--instead of Sister Souljah, I imagine it will be some radical feminist.

The right, in fact, missed an opportunity last year to establish the "SJW" as a stereotype of all Dems and manufacture a narrative out of it. I'm sure they will still try to do this, but the Dems have some time to prepare for it and tamp down the endless outrage emanating from the most doctrinaire of the left-wing outlets. Hence the current raft of "Students are so emotional and scary!" articles from Laura Kipnis and TPM and Vox and the like, and Michelle Obama telling Oberlin students to STFU. Some lefties are starting to run out of the burning social justice house, claiming they didn't set fire to it: "I was abused by these social justice maniacs! I wasn't one of them!" Disingenuousness aside, that will make it harder for the social justice movement to be turned into an icon of All That is Wrong with the Democrats. There was a moment of opportunity where, had the right taken the risk of embracing Gamergate, they could have attracted a lot of left-leaning people by taking on an ideology that was peaking at that very time. This was, I believe, precisely Christina Hoff Sommers' thinking. It's too late to do that now. It might not have worked anyway (it was a risky strategy because of factors 1 and 2), but I was scared that it would.

My mistake, then, was thinking that because the Dems saw Gamergate as a short-term political football, the Repubs did as well. They didn't, because the timing was wrong for them. The Repubs were concerned with their base, just as the Dems were concerned with theirs, but Gamergate was only a relevant issue (pro AND con) for the Dem base. Had Gamergate rolled around a year or two later, I believe the right would have tried to take up the Gamergate mantle more aggressively to peel off support from Hillary, but 2014 was too early for it to seem like a good idea. The long-term outlook was too unpredictable.

Instead, you are seeing a slower movement to peel off anti-social justice Dems through less orthodox right-wing venues like the Washington Examiner (keep an eye on Ashe Schow, Dems; hopefully the right is too dumb to allow her to be effective), Breitbart UK, and possibly the Daily Caller. It provides the best opportunity for Republicans to make inroads among the millennials that they have totally lost on social issues. They can't come out loudly for gay marriage or anything, but they can inveigh against the anti-tolerance of certain obnoxious leftist factions, and I'm sure they will. But the left now seems to be trying to rein in those excesses well ahead of Hillary's candidacy, to prevent the Repubs from capitalizing on it too heavily. Who will win the race?

Why on Earth would I start a column with this thesis? There is no faster way to alienate my audiencethat is, the people who pay my bills. And yet, this is exactly what writers at not one but half a dozen online gaming publications did to their audiences last week, and it points to a significant shift in the business of gaming. Gamers are not over, but gaming journalism is.

I think that there is next to zero interest among the press in establishing the facts around Gamergate, and quite a lot of pressure *against* establishing a factual record, Auerbach writes in an email. It has made any sort of public discussion around Gamergate impossible, and it is why I no longer participate in such discussion I did my best to bring the actual facts to peoples attention, but as I told Koretzky when he invited me to the Florida SPJ event, Im done with that particular Sisyphean boulder.

David "Not only are the press unfair to Gamergate. It's the worst case of journalistic malpractice I've ever been involved in!" Auerbach

For a troll, this is a perfect setup: maximum effect, minimal exposure. I could dox any woman in gaming, and Gamergate would get blamed. So as long as Gamergate drags on, trolls who care less about games than about causing chaos will wreak havoc. Even some of the anti-feminist members of Gamergate still try at least to appear reasonable in order to get their distasteful points across. Its the psychos, the hateful teenagers, and the diehard trolls who perform the scariest acts, and both sides of Gamergate serve them well

David "Gamergate isn't harassment. Those are just trolls oh and both sides." Auerbach

Ending Gamergate will not happen by moral grandstanding. Lets quickly go over tactics that have been tried so far to stop Gamergate, none of which have worked:

Hyperbolic comparisons of Gamergate to ISIS, the KKK, fascists, terrorists, Ebola, child pornography, etc., etc.
Endless ridicule and antagonism of Gamergaters on Twitter.
Convenient erasure of Gamergates many female, LGBTQ, and minority members, however wrong they may be.
Telling Intel and others they are misogynist cowards when they pull advertising.
Hauling out celebrities to condemn Gamergate and telling them their heroes hate them.
Threatening to blacklist Gamergate members from the gaming industry.
Wishful-thinking pieces like So Long, Gamergate.
Fire-and-brimstone sermons like Stop supporting Gamergate.
Shutting all gamers (not just Gamergate members) out of media discourse.
The old video games cause violence canard, unproven as ever.
Defective quantitative analysis.
Defective social science.
Obtuse social theorizing.

The key to reducing the movements size lies in the little known but surprisingly numerous species I call the Gamergate moderate (Gamergater moderabilus), which by my estimate constitutes well over half the movement. They are the people who make up Gamergates Harassment Patrol, which polices Twitter and has identified and reported some egregious harassers. Three of them appeared on HuffPost Live. Several talked with the Washington Posts Hayley Tsukayama. They have spoken (mostly) respectfully to those with whom they disagree on Twitter, Reddit, and blogs, and they tend to self-identify as social and economic liberals (really!). A Gamergate moderate a) genuinely opposes harassment and does not commit it (except inadvertently); b) is upset primarily with the gaming press rather than women per se; and c) feels sufficiently disenfranchised to support Gamergate anyway. That last quality has led science-fiction writer John Scalzi to write that moderates are Gamergates useful idiots, building up the movements numbers and momentum while providing cover for harassment. I wont comment on their politics, because theyre irrelevant for our immediate purposes. You dont need to make them into progressive feministsyou just need to get them to leave Gamergate. Lets make these idiots less useful.